Mary Shelley's Soft Subversion

“<Amplifying Risk: Mary Shelley's Soft Subversion>” Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was eighteen years old. All of her writing, public and private, paints a picture of a woman of passion who wrote a powerful novel at a volatile age, in a volatile age. When, in Toni Morrison’s words, “the invisible was what imagination strove to see…when questions and demands for answers burned so brightly [she] trembled with fury at not knowing…” (25). Shelley spent her late teens absorbing her activist mother’s works and discussing literature with her poet lover; her most important sources were personal and political (MacDonald and Scherf 12). She must have felt the tensions of the age, and under the influences of Romantic poets like Byron and Percy Shelley Hereafter, references to “Shelley” mean Mary Shelley., who often preferred to evoke emotions rather than describe them, she wrote the work that captures the fear, horror, and yearning potential of the early nineteenth century. William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were two of the most radical thinkers of their age, and as influential as they were, each had vigorous detractors as well as disciples. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was as radical as her parents, but preferred to be less confrontational. Shelley received no formal education; instead, Godwin schooled her at home, primarily teaching her how to study. Where those lessons ended, Godwin’s home lessons did not differentiate between boys and girls, and all of the children received music lessons at home; later Mary had to educate herself while the boys were sent away to school (Mellor 9-11). she educated herself by means of her father’s friends According to Brian Aldiss, Shelley was “A teenager! She was a teenager, you know?! Not the sort of female teenager today’s newspapers would have us believe in. Mary came from a civilized—a crowded but civilized—home. Literature, science and politics were regularly discussed there; Coleridge read his poetry there. (To see and to hear Samuel Taylor belting out ‘The Ancient Mariner’ might not have been to everyone’s taste—a bit like early Dr Who—but it is something to have a living poet rampant in the parlour…” (Aldiss). and his library (Mellor 9-10). Her letters confirm that she shared some of her mother’s radical spirit, whom she (by her own testimony) adored through devoted study of Mary Wollstonecraft’s books and papers (5); however, her later journals show that she was less confrontational than her parents. Her letters also reveal a fascination with Prometheus, the story of stealing fire from the gods—the classical example of hubris—and power that can either help or harm. The first and best source for a reading of Frankenstein is the author’s private correspondence. She was politically and philosophically radical (though not antagonistic) living much of her life in voluntary exile after Percy Shelley’s death in 1822, avoiding the public eye. She had an obvious interest in science, literature, and a definite will to social and philosophical thought, but at the same time a desire to avoid publicity. The result was a novel (taken with the introduction to the 1831 edition) that addressed the place of science and spirituality in 19th-century life, but fictionalized the debate to appeal to a popular audience and anonymously published to avoid the scathing social criticism that would have been leveled at the girl who had run off with a married poet. She had a lifelong concern with power and responsibility, which may explain the main themes present in Frankenstein. In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes that she began with a dream, what many psychologists consider our way of processing nebulous emotions and snippets of suspended information; she discovered in her dream what Ursula LeGuin calls reasons that Reason did not know, “If you are fantasizing…you might be using imagination…as a means of discovering reasons Reason does not know, discovering yourself to yourself” (LeGuin 40). Originally a Blaise Pascal quote: “Reason is the slow and tortuous method by which these who do not know the truth discover it. The heart has its own reason which reason does not know.” Pensées, 1670. and from this unconscious reason, transformed from her felt knowledge, came a text intended to evoke the same feelings and pass on the knowing—a text revised to her mature specifications, after Percy Shelley’s death, into a sophisticated, complex textual entity. Addressing Percy Shelley’s influence on the novel, Anne Mellor directly states that his revisions “can be grouped under two headings: those that improve the novel, and those that do not” (59). Mary Shelley accepted most of his revisions, which can largely be considered structural and grammatical: he gave her more precise technical terms, improved transitions, and “typically changed her simple, Anglo-Saxon diction and straightforward or colloquial sentence structures into their more refined, complex, and Latinate equivalents” (59-60). The Latinate construction is something not all readers have considered an improvement. Almost everyone who has read the novel is familiar with Frankenstein’s origin story: ‘“We will each,” cried Byron, “write a ghost story!” So Mary went away and thought about it, fruitlessly, until a few nights later she had a nightmare in which a “pale student” used strange arts and machineries to arouse from unlife the “hideous phantasm of a man”’ (LeGuin 41). In her 1831 introduction to the novel, Shelley wrote that the image “…haunted me...if I could only contrive to frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!” (9). She recognized some of the frightful depth and powerful potential of her story: “What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow” (9). MacDonald and Scherf D. L. MacDonald, Kathleen Scherf, Broadview Editionsuggest that Shelley felt that the “relentless rationalism that initially made her father’s book An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. so exciting ultimately made it forbidding” (13). I take this to mean that Shelley approved of her father’s ideals with respect to political justice. Frankenstein is dedicated to him, and MacDonald and Scherf go so far as to say that “even without this clue, reviewers would probably have identified the anonymous author as one of his disciples” (12). But though she approved of his ideas, she may not have thought that his methods were perfect. In fact, she had always been reserved, and as a mature woman, she found political extremism alienating; an often-quoted Often quoted, but never cited—and it is interesting what is invariably left out. The omitted section reveals turbulent emotion that she obviously preferred to deal with in her own way, indirectly and without confrontation. entry from her journals, dated October 21, 1838, clearly shows her feelings toward direct confrontation: …some have a passion for reforming the world; others do not cling to particular opinions. That my parents and Shelly were of the former class, makes me respect it. I respect such when joined to real disinterestedness, toleration, and a clear understanding…I earnestly desire the good and enlightenment of my fellow creatures…but I am not for violent extremes, which duly bring on an injurious reaction. (553) Shelley’s own words speak a firm devotion to responsibility; she is the kind of thinker who respects scientists who eagerly delve nature the way political radicals delve philosophy, but only when joined with those same qualities. She cannot condone violent extremism—or Victor’s violent passions—but believes in care and mindfulness. She does not endeavor to teach (as she declares in her letters she cannot do) but to paint a picture which will not “bring on an injurious reaction” because it is only a novel, a conte philosophique. Shelley found her father’s style forbidding, perhaps inaccessible to lay readers. In a letter to Edward John Trelawney dated January 26, 1837, she wrote, “I cannot teach, I can only paint,” which is a much less aggressive way of critiquing cultural values (Selected Letters 268). The portrait she paints is one of a man who “should have better balanced the obligations of great and small, of parent and child, of creator and creature” (Mellor 126). She may have thought herself unable to teach, but it is doubtful that she could have been unaware of the role of storytelling in teaching. She was, however, well aware of possible resistance to some of what she had to say, and entered the discourse of the day through a side door: “I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to avoiding the enervating effects of novels of the present day” (12). It must be noted that Percy Shelley wrote the preface to Frankenstein. However, judging from her private papers, his preface does not seem to be a misrepresentation of Mary Shelley’s views, except possibly the following passage: “It was commenced, partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these, as the work proceeded” (11). Percy Shelley believed that Mary Shelley had a literary birthright, and did urge her to claim it by writing. That contains a statement that fiction carries moral weight that may affect readers, and her concern with energizing readers is explicit. So her statement (actually a caveat inserted into the preface by Percy Shelley) that “The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any influence justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing an philosophical doctrine of whatever kind” (12) is slightly disingenuous. In fact, subjectivity is one of the strengths of fiction as a teaching tool, because it is less reductive than more didactic modes. Shelley’s refusal to tell readers which doctrine to espouse is her best means of calling all dogma into question. Shelley’s commentary on science is partly a response to culture, partly to her father specifically—but with the caveat that her father was a leading intellectual of the day who represented one school of thought. Godwin was a leading religious Dissenter (Royle 119-120). To say that Shelley wrote partially in response to her father’s views and specifically in response to one of his books is not to reduce Frankenstein to a simple act of worshipful tribute to her father’s views: it was a complex text in its own right, and its form served as a critique. In fact, in reference to Shelley’s novel The Last Man, Mellor writes that Shelley “criticizes the utopian idealism of her father and husband” as well as more conservative political ideologies (162). Shelley, like her mother, was more aware (than her father) of the interdependence of rationality and emotion. Mary Wollstonecraft wove allusion, imagery, and metaphor into her rhetoric, drawing heavily on Milton. Shelley’s familiarity with her mother’s work is firmly established; it can be said without embellishment that she learned metaphor and deeply felt argument at her mother’s grave, but a galvanic spark entirely her own took her further down a creative rhetorical path than either of her parents ventured. As Mellor explains it, Shelley’s “radical epistemological skepticism forces her to insist upon the fictiveness and temporality of all imaginative constructs…[and] forces her to fuse the literal and the figurative in one continuous language system” (164). Brian Attebery writes that fantasy, or more broadly the fantastic, is “emotionally and psychologically, if not scientifically valid” (109). As Shelley claims in the preface to Frankenstein, “I have […] endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature” (11). What this all means is that Shelley was attempting to write something real and true, and found that she could best do that through a fantastic narrative laced with metaphor. The “psychological validity” of the fantastic is part of the formula that helped Shelley establish an archetype. Sir Walter Scott called Frankenstein the most “philosophical and refined” kind of fantastic fiction, which isn’t fantastic for its own sake, but uses the fantastic to explain the workings of the human mind. Locating the Science in the First Science Fiction Novel Shelley calls man a creator, a word that sets her in opposition to contemporary religious doctrine. MacDonald and Scherf call this a bold move (17). It did particularly offend one reviewer writing for Edinburgh Magazine, who wishes Shelley would “study the established order of nature as it appears, both in the world of matter and of mind than continue to revolt our feelings [emphasis mine] by hazardous innovations in either of those departments” (308). That matter of mind is the radical idea: Shelley’s monster embodies the idea that nurture, not nature, may be paramount. That is why some discussion of genre is important—to explain why Frankenstein was radical, one must account for why it was science fictional or transgressive. Shelley and Frankenstein are mentioned in nearly every chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, but perhaps the most important mention is by Slonczewski and Levy, in the chapter “Science Fiction and the Life Sciences.” Slonczewski and Levy call Frankenstein a founding work, “arguably the basis for sf since” (174). They write that “In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers faced questions of biological change, intended or unintended, in human nature or in our natural surroundings,” referring to the upheavals of thought caused by the pace of scientific and technological advances. The critical observations are that the nineteenth century was a time of scientific change, particularly biological, and that the idea behind Frankenstein was “extrapolated from known science of that era, the electrical stimulation of dead muscle” (174). In 1803, Giovanni Aldini attempted to reanimate a corpse by applying electric current. However, other critics name other reasons for calling Frankenstein the first fully realized science fiction novel: Mendlesohn argues On April 7, 2008, Mendlesohn sent me part of a chapter excised from her March 2008 book, Rhetorics of Fantasy, formalizing a position she has argued in prior personal communications, namely that Frankenstein is science fiction, but perhaps not for the reasons other critics have argued. that it is Victor Frankenstein’s failure to deal with his creation in a satisfactory manner, “rather than the electrified corpse, which truly place[s] Frankenstein as the progenitor of sf. In [chapters 11 and 12] Shelley argues for nurture not nature, and heralds the obsession of science fiction with the scientific and rationalised education” (“Frankie” 2). Mellor agrees with Brian Aldiss and other critics who claim that Shelley “initiated a new literary genre,” now called science fiction. More importantly, she writes, Shelley …used this knowledge both to analyze and criticize the more dangerous implications of the scientific method and its practical results. Implicitly, she contrasted what she considered to be ‘good’ science—the detailed and reverent descriptions of the workings of nature—to what she considered to be ‘bad’ science, the hubristic manipulation of the elemental forces of nature to serve man’s private ends. (89) But while that’s true to some extent, the creature’s origin is far less important than his education. In that paragraph, it is possible to replace “science” with “education,” altering very little else, and arrive at what gives the novel its identity as science fiction—not what makes it look like science fiction. It involved taking control of not only one’s own thoughts, but how people thought about thinking. Taking control of shaping and molding minds was on par with taking power out of the hands of the priesthood; that was the fire stolen from the gods. Percy Shelley, always more confrontational than Mary Shelley, wrote a moralizing essay “On the Necessity of Atheism.” One has to look also at her novel The Last Man to see the complete picture, but the foundation of her philosophy is evident even in Frankenstein; Mary Shelley subtly argues for the secular and against the theological. What we teach ourselves to be is what we become: “Mary Shelley posits no overarching mind of God, no eternal Power, no transcendental subject, to guarantee the truth or endurance of mental things” (Mellor 159). Maurice Hindle writes about two versions of the Prometheus myth (xxviii): Prometheus pyrphoros, in which Prometheus steals the spark and gives simple fire to people, and Prometheus plasticator, by Ovid, in which Prometheus takes the living cosmic spark and molds man from it. Shelley essentially combines the two, which hit a unique pitch capable of playing on fears of transgressing the natural order in whichever way the reader liked least, blending and conflating the divine prerogative of forming the mind and the brain. Aldiss’s case for why Frankenstein is science fiction can be read in much the same way as Mellor’s: …it was Mary Shelley, poised between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, who first wrote of life—that vital spark—being created not by divine intervention as hitherto, but by scientific means; by hard work and by research. That was new, and in a sense it remains new. The difference is impressive, persuasive, permanent. (Aldiss) All one need do is replace the word “spark” with the Romantic concept of genius; the idea that great minds could be molded by hard work was revolutionary. Gilbert and Gubar call Shelley, and other female writers who came out of the Romantic period, “Milton’s daughters.” who, they claim, confronted her poetic father-figure by taking elements of his magnum opus and rewriting them as “a more accurate mirror of female experience” (220). Emphasis theirs. However, Shelley challenges Milton. When she quotes Adam out of context, she is subverting Milton by taking one of the most rebellious lines from Paradise Lost VIII (381-391) as her epigraph, cutting it off before the apologetic coda. Milton’s Adam is sorry, but Shelley’s monster is not.